Problem with Google reading https homepage?

[G.Anderson]

Hi Moz Community,

In July, we changed our homepage to https via a 301 redirect from http (the only page on our site with https).

Our homepage receives an A grade in the ‘On Page Grader’ by Moz for our desired keyword.

We have increased our backlink efforts directly to our homepage since we switched to the SSL homepage. However, we still have not increased in search ranking for our specific keyword.

Is there something we could have missed when doing the 301 redirect (submitting a new sitemap, changing rotbots.txt files, or anything else??) that has resulted in Google not correctly accessing the https version?  (the https page has been indexed by Google).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[G.Anderson]

Hi Federico,

Thanks for taking the time to check out the site. I understand that there are hundreds of factors that come into play when looking at search ranking. It's just frustrating that we've pretty much followed all the instructions laid out on SEO Moz but don't seem to be getting the results - the only reason I can see why this might be is because of something related to our homepage under SSL (the redirect, the sitemap, or something simple missing in the structure).

I have analyzed our competitors and I cannot see why we are not getting improvements compared to what they are doing.

When choosing an SEO professional, how can we be sure that they will be able to diagnose the issue we are having as nobody so far has been able to pinpoint the issue?

-G

[FedeEinhorn]

Hey G,

I took a quick look at your Website and link profile.

There's no much I can suggest other than continue working on your site. The on page grader is just another metric, but you can't take that and expect higher rankings.

Google say they consider over 200 metrics to rank Websites, not only links, but also content, navigation, user interface, etc.

If I was required to suggest you changes these a few a would start:

• make the site on HTTP or HTTPS. There's no reason to have only your homepage under HTTPS unless you transfer sensitive data over a form in that page (password). You have the sign up and sign in forms, both using a target script that is under HTTPS, but no other page actually requires HTTPS. I would personally go with everything HTTPS. While we are on this, Godaddy certificates, while cheap are insanely slow. I mean, each time a user request a page under SSL, it needs to verify the certificate with Godaddy's repos, and theirs is slower than several other issuing entities. I guess that's because the amount of certs they have (given the price). I would choose to use a better provider.
• Are you using some kind of HTML compressor? I guess you are because of your output. Have you considered using CloudFlare? As you will probably leverage from several of their features, like file catching (none of your images is being cached).
• Consider writing a blog, creating content that others can use and then link to your site. You already have interesting links, but getting new on a daily basis naturally will help a lot.
• Check your HTML, there are some html errors.
• Check your competitors, what are they doing that you aren't? (except of shady SEO techniques).

As for the 301, it is perfectly implemented. Your robots file has nothing in it and does not need to. You can probably add (and remove everything else in the file):

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

But it wouldn't help much or even anything.

It will require a much more in-depth research, you may want to hire a professional SEO to look at your site and competitors'. I based my quick review only on your site, I don't know who your competitors are or what keywords you are targeting.

Hope that helps, a bit at least

[G.Anderson]

Hi Fredico,

In addition to my last response to your comment, I've attached the Moz results for the page I am referring to. We are currently ranked number 8, and I have no idea why we wouldn't be ahead of the competitors in slot number 3, 4, or 5 (considering we have a higher on page SEO grading than them too).

Again, these all just point to the fact that we might have some basic technical issue with the 301 redirect that is stopping some juice or properly reading of our page.

-G

5

[G.Anderson]

Hi Federico,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Here's a link to the homepage of the site where we have the 301 redirect to https: http://goo.gl/qpGPFa

I have a feeling that we are not doing something correctly with regards to the robots.txt file or with our sitemap that is resulting on Google having to index the https and the http parts of our site individually.

Regardless, any advice/input you might have on why you think our rankings are not increasing would be greatly appreciated (we have higher Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Backlinks than one of our competitors ranked who is higher!)

-G

[FedeEinhorn]

Hey,

As far as I know, Google has no issues at all reading HTTPS pages even if the site has mixed pages (http and https).

Probably, your Website lacks authority and that's why you are not ranking better. Not only the links help, in fact, there are over 200 factors that contribute to ranking Websites by Google.

If you share the URL, we can probably give some suggestions of what to do.

Question tho, why securing only the homepage but the entire site? Do you have a login form in the homepage only?